THE THIRD WAVE

By dint of heroic effort, Mao’s China—which invented and tried out basic elements of the First Wave formula—almost, but not quite, managed to prevent famine. This was a towering achievement. But by the late sixties, the Maoist emphasis on rural development and backyard industry had gone as far as it could go. China had reached a dead end.

For the First Wave formula, by itself, is ultimately a recipe for stagnation and is no more applicable to the entire range of poor countries than the Second Wave strategy.

In a world of exploding diversity we shall have to invent scores of innovative strategies and stop looking for models either in the industrial present—or in the preindustrial past. It is time we began to look at the emergent future.

THE THIRD WAVE QUESTION

Must we remain forever trapped between two obsolete visions? I have deliberately caricatured these alternative strategies to sharpen the differences. In real life, few governments can afford to follow abstract theories, and we find many attempts to combine elements of both strategies. Yet the rise of the Third Wave strongly suggests that we no longer need to Ping-Pong back and forth between these two formulas.

For the arrival of the Third Wave drastically alters everything. And while no theory emanating from the high-technology world, whether capitalist or Marxist in bias, is going to solve the problems of the “developing world,” and no existing models are wholly transferable, a strange new relationship is springing up between First Wave societies and the fast-forming Third Wave civilization.

More than once we have seen naive attempts to “develop” a basically First Wave country by imposing on it highly incongruous Second Wave forms—mass production, mass media, factory-style education.Westminster-style parliamentary government, and the nation-state, to name a few—without recognizing that for these to operatesuccessfully, traditional family and marriage customs, religion, and rolestructures would all have to be crushed, the entire culture ripped up by its roots.
By astonishing contrast, Third Wave civilization turns out to have many features—decentralized production, appropriate scale, renewable energy, de-urbanization, work in the home, high levels of presumption, to name just a few—that actually

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